I remember when you used to have to be a skilled hacker/cracker to shut down someone's account. These days all you need is some offical looking stationary, a small book of leagalize, and the address of their ISP.
I can just see it now. One jerk gets peeved off at someone, so he posts a movie to the usenet with bogus IP packets, then send a letter claiming to be from a major studio to his ISP. The best part is, the first step is completely optional, you can do this all with just the social engineering!
This is why most laws in the US are taken on an "innocent until proven guilty" stance.
802.15 and 802.11 have very different purposes. 802.11 is designed from the ground up to be "wireless ethernet" while 802.15 is really a replacement for IR ports and for wire replacement. For instance, 802.15 has an SDP, a Service Discovery Protocol, which is basically a way do discover what the other bluetooth devices in your piconet can do. The original idea was for you to press the "Print" button and your bluetooth device goes out and asks who can handle something called a "print job". The local BT enabled printer pipes up and they negotiate automatically (The 802.15 spec also has provisions for authentication and encryption), and your print job automagically appears on the printer. To do this with 802.11, you would have to make some sort of Service Discovery layer on top of the 802.11 standard, and most 802.11 devices wouldn't support it. Bluetooth devices also draw much less power than 802.11 devices in general, and the 802.15 spec even has provisions for cutting down on your tx power if you are close enough to the piconet master (although I don't think most devices implement this yet).
In a nutshell this article is the equivlent of saying that Ethernet is going to kill off USB, because it's obviously so much faster and stuff.
And for all that you only have to give up power, ease of starting (especially in cold weather), and 75% of all gas stations.
The reason nobody uses diesel anymore is because it was too underpowered and too finacky in cars. Also, all of the consumer grade diesels sounded like dump trucks and weren't particularly clean burning (especially at startup).
I'm sure a diesel car built today would be a lot better in certain areas, but I doubt it's going to seriously beat out conventional gasoline in any way that matters to even the enviornmentally concious consumer.
Er, the fortune at the bottom only updates once every 30 minutes or so IIRC. That fortune has been like that for ages not (perhaps forever, I can't remember how it worked in the original Slashcode).
I'm not so sure about the second one there. For the longest time Be didn't have a decent web browser (which is sort of a reverse-killer app, if you don't have it your platform is dead). In fact although they were Posix complient (at least mostly) there are still a lot of apps that won't complile without a bit of tweaking. Last time I checked (this is 4.5 days or so) there were quite a few applications ported over, but they still had a long way to go.
Well, 1 is considered equivlent to 2 for very large values of 1.
Re:The drivers will decide...
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 2
This has always been the sticking point with ATI cards for me. Every ATI card I've owned has had poor Windows drivers (If I see one more blue screen in atidrab.dll...) and they never seem to deliver what they promise. It's pretty scary when I get better performance out of my Matrox G200 than out of the Rage chip in my work machine. (In Black and White in case you are wondering)
The big killer is that Matrox released a 3D accelerated library for my card (the HAL) that really works nicely in XFree 4 even in FreeBSD. That gesture goes a long way towards making my next video card a Matrox card as well (as well as my friends cards). Good thing for ATI that they release the specs for their cards (albeit a little late usually IIRC). Maybe they can finally put pressure on NVidia to be less protective of the programming interface on their cards.
Huh? I went to the site to see when it was going to be released and it just said "soon". I wasn't particularly keen on preordering a game from a company filing Chapter 11 for obvious reasons, but once it is actually available I'm almost certainly going to buy it. Still, a few pity buys aren't going to save them if they are in the kind of trouble it looks like they are in.
I know what you mean. I just played through the demo of Kohan and was going to check out Loki's site for more information on it. So I pulled up Mozilla and my homepage (Slashdot) loads and what do I see: Loki is dying! Gah! I really hate dual booting to play games, and the Kohan demo ran great on my (fairly meager by todays standards) system.
Now it seems like the only thing that will save Loki is either a killer title or just a sudden surge in Linux gaming popularity. I'm not enthusiastic about the second possiblity, but the first has happened before (although as a game porting company Loki is not going to have an easy time making any sort of killer app).
By the way, for those of you who don't know, Loki's demo system is pretty cool, it keeps a list of all of the available demos in a central app and lets you automaticaly download, install, play, and uninstall them. It's really quite nice.
Take a look at any of the ebook usenet groups one day and you'll see that ebooks aren't dying, rather they are only viable as an underground were people digitize all of the greatest new releases (and older classics, and older not-so-classics) and distribute them in easily read formats. You can get nearly any modern book from these people in plain old text, which you can slap on a Palm or simliar device and read on the bus/train/whereever you want.
Contrast this with "official" ebooks, where you have to buy an expensive and proprietary reader for your expensive books from exceptionally obscure authors. Worse, these readers have all sorts of annoying "copy protection" built in that makes you a thief for even trying to give your book to a friend (like you can do with regular old paperbacks), and the publisers treat you like the enemy when you buy one of these.
I think the truth is in the article. Ebooks are the future, unfortunatly that's a future without publishers, so the publishers of today have every incentive to make ebooks look as bad as possible and makes sure that everybody knows that "everyone else prefers the tactile sensation of books over any of those crappy ebook things that you want to stay away from."
Of course the publishing industry is slow to change, so we probably won't see the publishing industry die anytime soon.
If this is true, then Fair Use died with the DMCA. Since the manufacturer can use any sort of protection method they want (even ROT13), and it is illegal to break such protection then you can never make a copy and Fair Use has no meaning. This truely is a sad day.
You'd have to be kinda dense...
on
Joy of Linux
·
· Score: 2
Even if you missed the Joy of Sex reference in the title, the chapter titles are a dead giveaway:
1. Do You Know Who Your Millions of Partners Are?
1. The Penguin on Top
And so on. It's all over once you get to:
8. The Linux Sutra: Resources
I mean, it's not even meaningful outside of the context of the unusual title of the book. I think most of the people on here pointing out the joke need to give the average Slashdot reader a bit more credit.
Reminds me of the Digimon movie (OK, Children's War Game OAVs) where they defeated the bad guy (who was a Digimon, sort of a computer program monster) by having kids all over the world mail bomb it.
Your mom needs to tell her friends to stop forwarding those big header filled posts on to spammers. Honestly, I don't think those chain letters are as bad as a problem as you think they are. A spammer would have to be forwarded the letter directly from someone (who doesn't trim forwarding info), and most people don't want to send their address to spammers. The biggest danger is that a friend of a friend of a friend will forward that onto someone who posts it somewhere with the headers intact, but that's a pretty rare occurance in my experiance.
You must not be in the scene. A LOT Of the pirated movies (well the ones I see anyway) are the kinds that have been out of production for years, or were never released in the US (lots of anime). Granted, there's quite a bit of first run stuff as well in some groups, but who cares about that?
The quality is actually quite good these days thanks to DivX;-). If your video card has TV-out, you can pump the movie directly to your home entertainment unit and get the full effect. It's really quite astounding how nice a lot of these 50MB TV episodes look these days.
My bottom line is having fun when I play a game. If it involves funky dance pads, maraccas, force feedback, or even good game design, I'm all for it. I remember the old floor pad for the 8 bit NES, it was quite a workout to actually use the thing with any of the games for it (no DDR). Most everything for it was track and field games where you basically had to run in place for like 15 minutes for a single round. It was actually fun at the time (although you were *exausted* after playing a game on it).
Gee, maybe people are finally getting tired of all of the crap they have to go through to get DSL from companies like Verizon. Or maybe because the DSL people don't seem to want to do new installations anymore.
As for the decline in hits on some websites, I'd say that web users are becoming more savvy now. The novelty has worn off for many of them. We can't expect hamsterdance to maintain the level of clicks it had in '98 now can we?
In our area (Northern Virgina) the @home service is pretty much second to none for the local broadbands, but this really isn't saying much. The Roadrunner is quite horrendous and DSL solutions tend to take 6-8 months to get intstalled. Even then they are slow and use PPPoe and don't let you keep a static IP address.
One thing we had a big problem with: we had a fast ethernet card connected to the cablemodem. As many of you know, autodetection is very unreliable when the other end of the cable is wired down to some speed. As it turns out, the cable modem was using 10 base T half duplex (normal slow ethernet) while our cards were autodetecting full duplex. Once we wired down our card to 10bt half the connection improved about 1000x.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
ARM processers have been around for quite awhile now. They are semi-modern RISC machines that don't have a lot of the brain dead architectural cruft from years gone by.
And no, they can't help you move pencils with your telekenetic "third arm", sorry.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I tend to think of Diablo as a roguelike you can actually win.
Is it just me or do all of the text based roguelike authors seem to have some dread fear that someone somewhere might win the game?
I especially remember rogue (I still play it once in a while) where it seems like anytime your character starts doing good (you find the two handed sword, a ring of rust resistance (or whatever it's called), and some nice armor the RNG will decide to do you in and stop putting food on the levels, leaving your adventurer to eventually starve to death or faint while fighting a dragon.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
One thing that I really loved about the Bouncer was that Square left the Japanese voice track in the American release, and they even included a subtitle option. It is really really cool to have the cutscenes subtitled, plus the Japanese voice actors for that game were pretty good.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when you used to have to be a skilled hacker/cracker to shut down someone's account. These days all you need is some offical looking stationary, a small book of leagalize, and the address of their ISP.
I can just see it now. One jerk gets peeved off at someone, so he posts a movie to the usenet with bogus IP packets, then send a letter claiming to be from a major studio to his ISP. The best part is, the first step is completely optional, you can do this all with just the social engineering!
This is why most laws in the US are taken on an "innocent until proven guilty" stance.
802.15 and 802.11 have very different purposes. 802.11 is designed from the ground up to be "wireless ethernet" while 802.15 is really a replacement for IR ports and for wire replacement. For instance, 802.15 has an SDP, a Service Discovery Protocol, which is basically a way do discover what the other bluetooth devices in your piconet can do. The original idea was for you to press the "Print" button and your bluetooth device goes out and asks who can handle something called a "print job". The local BT enabled printer pipes up and they negotiate automatically (The 802.15 spec also has provisions for authentication and encryption), and your print job automagically appears on the printer. To do this with 802.11, you would have to make some sort of Service Discovery layer on top of the 802.11 standard, and most 802.11 devices wouldn't support it. Bluetooth devices also draw much less power than 802.11 devices in general, and the 802.15 spec even has provisions for cutting down on your tx power if you are close enough to the piconet master (although I don't think most devices implement this yet).
In a nutshell this article is the equivlent of saying that Ethernet is going to kill off USB, because it's obviously so much faster and stuff.
And for all that you only have to give up power, ease of starting (especially in cold weather), and 75% of all gas stations.
The reason nobody uses diesel anymore is because it was too underpowered and too finacky in cars. Also, all of the consumer grade diesels sounded like dump trucks and weren't particularly clean burning (especially at startup).
I'm sure a diesel car built today would be a lot better in certain areas, but I doubt it's going to seriously beat out conventional gasoline in any way that matters to even the enviornmentally concious consumer.
Er, the fortune at the bottom only updates once every 30 minutes or so IIRC. That fortune has been like that for ages not (perhaps forever, I can't remember how it worked in the original Slashcode).
I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for TripTic Blaster and Gran Turismo Safe driving edition.
Great. I can give my money to the Tobacco companies...or to Lawyers. Maybe I should just burn it instead.
I'm not so sure about the second one there. For the longest time Be didn't have a decent web browser (which is sort of a reverse-killer app, if you don't have it your platform is dead). In fact although they were Posix complient (at least mostly) there are still a lot of apps that won't complile without a bit of tweaking. Last time I checked (this is 4.5 days or so) there were quite a few applications ported over, but they still had a long way to go.
Well, 1 is considered equivlent to 2 for very large values of 1.
This has always been the sticking point with ATI cards for me. Every ATI card I've owned has had poor Windows drivers (If I see one more blue screen in atidrab.dll...) and they never seem to deliver what they promise. It's pretty scary when I get better performance out of my Matrox G200 than out of the Rage chip in my work machine. (In Black and White in case you are wondering)
The big killer is that Matrox released a 3D accelerated library for my card (the HAL) that really works nicely in XFree 4 even in FreeBSD. That gesture goes a long way towards making my next video card a Matrox card as well (as well as my friends cards). Good thing for ATI that they release the specs for their cards (albeit a little late usually IIRC). Maybe they can finally put pressure on NVidia to be less protective of the programming interface on their cards.
Huh? I went to the site to see when it was going to be released and it just said "soon". I wasn't particularly keen on preordering a game from a company filing Chapter 11 for obvious reasons, but once it is actually available I'm almost certainly going to buy it. Still, a few pity buys aren't going to save them if they are in the kind of trouble it looks like they are in.
I know what you mean. I just played through the demo of Kohan and was going to check out Loki's site for more information on it. So I pulled up Mozilla and my homepage (Slashdot) loads and what do I see: Loki is dying! Gah! I really hate dual booting to play games, and the Kohan demo ran great on my (fairly meager by todays standards) system.
Now it seems like the only thing that will save Loki is either a killer title or just a sudden surge in Linux gaming popularity. I'm not enthusiastic about the second possiblity, but the first has happened before (although as a game porting company Loki is not going to have an easy time making any sort of killer app).
By the way, for those of you who don't know, Loki's demo system is pretty cool, it keeps a list of all of the available demos in a central app and lets you automaticaly download, install, play, and uninstall them. It's really quite nice.
Take a look at any of the ebook usenet groups one day and you'll see that ebooks aren't dying, rather they are only viable as an underground were people digitize all of the greatest new releases (and older classics, and older not-so-classics) and distribute them in easily read formats. You can get nearly any modern book from these people in plain old text, which you can slap on a Palm or simliar device and read on the bus/train/whereever you want.
Contrast this with "official" ebooks, where you have to buy an expensive and proprietary reader for your expensive books from exceptionally obscure authors. Worse, these readers have all sorts of annoying "copy protection" built in that makes you a thief for even trying to give your book to a friend (like you can do with regular old paperbacks), and the publisers treat you like the enemy when you buy one of these.
I think the truth is in the article. Ebooks are the future, unfortunatly that's a future without publishers, so the publishers of today have every incentive to make ebooks look as bad as possible and makes sure that everybody knows that "everyone else prefers the tactile sensation of books over any of those crappy ebook things that you want to stay away from."
Of course the publishing industry is slow to change, so we probably won't see the publishing industry die anytime soon.
Are you sure you didn't change your font?
Mozilla 0.9.3 (Win2k--hey I'm at work) is showing all of your symbols pefectly.
He's only out on Bail. He can still be sent to jail if he is found in violation of the DMCA. I wouldn't toss your Free Dimitri shirt quite yet.
If this is true, then Fair Use died with the DMCA. Since the manufacturer can use any sort of protection method they want (even ROT13), and it is illegal to break such protection then you can never make a copy and Fair Use has no meaning. This truely is a sad day.
Even if you missed the Joy of Sex reference in the title, the chapter titles are a dead giveaway:
1. Do You Know Who Your Millions of Partners Are?
1. The Penguin on Top
And so on. It's all over once you get to:
8. The Linux Sutra: Resources
I mean, it's not even meaningful outside of the context of the unusual title of the book. I think most of the people on here pointing out the joke need to give the average Slashdot reader a bit more credit.
Reminds me of the Digimon movie (OK, Children's War Game OAVs) where they defeated the bad guy (who was a Digimon, sort of a computer program monster) by having kids all over the world mail bomb it.
Your mom needs to tell her friends to stop forwarding those big header filled posts on to spammers. Honestly, I don't think those chain letters are as bad as a problem as you think they are. A spammer would have to be forwarded the letter directly from someone (who doesn't trim forwarding info), and most people don't want to send their address to spammers. The biggest danger is that a friend of a friend of a friend will forward that onto someone who posts it somewhere with the headers intact, but that's a pretty rare occurance in my experiance.
You must not be in the scene. A LOT Of the pirated movies (well the ones I see anyway) are the kinds that have been out of production for years, or were never released in the US (lots of anime). Granted, there's quite a bit of first run stuff as well in some groups, but who cares about that?
;-). If your video card has TV-out, you can pump the movie directly to your home entertainment unit and get the full effect. It's really quite astounding how nice a lot of these 50MB TV episodes look these days.
The quality is actually quite good these days thanks to DivX
My bottom line is having fun when I play a game. If it involves funky dance pads, maraccas, force feedback, or even good game design, I'm all for it. I remember the old floor pad for the 8 bit NES, it was quite a workout to actually use the thing with any of the games for it (no DDR). Most everything for it was track and field games where you basically had to run in place for like 15 minutes for a single round. It was actually fun at the time (although you were *exausted* after playing a game on it).
Gee, maybe people are finally getting tired of all of the crap they have to go through to get DSL from companies like Verizon. Or maybe because the DSL people don't seem to want to do new installations anymore.
As for the decline in hits on some websites, I'd say that web users are becoming more savvy now. The novelty has worn off for many of them. We can't expect hamsterdance to maintain the level of clicks it had in '98 now can we?
In our area (Northern Virgina) the @home service is pretty much second to none for the local broadbands, but this really isn't saying much. The Roadrunner is quite horrendous and DSL solutions tend to take 6-8 months to get intstalled. Even then they are slow and use PPPoe and don't let you keep a static IP address.
One thing we had a big problem with: we had a fast ethernet card connected to the cablemodem. As many of you know, autodetection is very unreliable when the other end of the cable is wired down to some speed. As it turns out, the cable modem was using 10 base T half duplex (normal slow ethernet) while our cards were autodetecting full duplex. Once we wired down our card to 10bt half the connection improved about 1000x.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
ARM processers have been around for quite awhile now. They are semi-modern RISC machines that don't have a lot of the brain dead architectural cruft from years gone by.
And no, they can't help you move pencils with your telekenetic "third arm", sorry.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I tend to think of Diablo as a roguelike you can actually win.
Is it just me or do all of the text based roguelike authors seem to have some dread fear that someone somewhere might win the game?
I especially remember rogue (I still play it once in a while) where it seems like anytime your character starts doing good (you find the two handed sword, a ring of rust resistance (or whatever it's called), and some nice armor the RNG will decide to do you in and stop putting food on the levels, leaving your adventurer to eventually starve to death or faint while fighting a dragon.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
One thing that I really loved about the Bouncer was that Square left the Japanese voice track in the American release, and they even included a subtitle option. It is really really cool to have the cutscenes subtitled, plus the Japanese voice actors for that game were pretty good.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.